1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to information filtering and data mining. More specifically, the invention relates to computer-based systems and methods for determining the relatedness between products or other viewable items represented within a database, and for using item relatedness data combined with price data to select items to recommend to users.
2. Description of the Related Art
A recommendation service is a computer-implemented service that recommends items to users from a database of items. The recommendations are customized to particular users based on information known about the users. One common application for recommendation services involves recommending products to online customers. For example, shopping sites commonly provide services for recommending products (books, compact discs, videos, etc.) to customers based on item viewing histories, purchase histories, item ratings, and/or other behaviors of the customers.
Some recommendation systems identify items that are related to one another based on the monitored behaviors of users. See, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 7,685,074. The item relationships are determined by analyzing user purchase histories, product viewing histories, and/or other types of recorded behavioral data reflecting users' interests in particular items. This process may be repeated periodically (e.g., once per day or once per week) to incorporate the latest browsing activities of users. The resulting item-to-item mappings may be used to provide item recommendations to users in various contexts. For example, the item-to-item mappings may be used to supplement product detail pages of an electronic catalog with lists of related items, and/or may be used to generate personalized recommendations for particular users.